


calling out at the mess you made

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [34]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: C-PTSD, Dissociative Episode, Hydra did a number on Bucky, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The chair, sutures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 20:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4494408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Steve," he says, the tired wrapping itself all the way into his thoughts and stripping most of them out, "I broke the fucking balcony door. It's pouring out. The floor's going to turn into a fucking lake." </p><p>"Ye-eah," Steve says, "and while you get your shirt off I'm gonna tape a couple plastic garbage bags over the hole, throw some towels on the floor and ignore it until I give a damn."</p>
            </blockquote>





	calling out at the mess you made

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.
> 
> Written for the Hurt/Comfort Bingo prompt "minor injury".

Sometimes he feels like a kid. At least, he figures this has to be what kids, what babies fucking feel like - babies, toddlers, when they're throwing a fit. Like the whole world hits you in the fucking face from outside and all of your mind hits the side of your head from inside until all you've got left is screaming and the desperate fucking need to let it out and get away. 

Except he doesn't scream. Maybe it would be easier if he could. He just breaks things. 

This time he broke the balcony door and it's raining outside, fucking pouring down hard, and now he's wet, he's cold, and it's his own fault. He almost wants to laugh at that and maybe he could finish it that way, die like that: laughing hysterically until the heaving makes him throw up and then choke to death on that. Except he probably wouldn't die. Like he never dies. 

The world has tried really, really fucking hard to make him die and he's still here. God and the Devil keep fucking throwing him back, and who knows why the fuck they bother. He just ends up here all twisted up until he blows up. Like he just did. And maybe it does what it's meant to, maybe it lets off the pressure that's crushing him, but for one it never lasts, and for another there's always the mess afterwards in the drop that feels like every awful fucking hangover he ever had, but all at once. 

It still doesn't kill him. 

He cut himself, in a couple places. He's bleeding on his shirt and he's going to hate that later, actually likes this shirt. But he doesn't do anything about it, doesn't try to take it off or move and his head, inside, it wants to fade out. Keeps tallying up the damage, the mess, and trying to pull back and unfocus, wrap the blank grey all around everything inside his head. Thinks it knows what's next, what to do, says _we know what happens now we know we go away and we wait till it's done_ and _we deserve it_ and it's like fucking Extreme Trauma 101 and he wants it to fucking stop. 

Except the only other thing he's got is that laughing-that-isn't that feels like he's fucking being stabbed over and over again in the chest, different place each time. Knows that it actually feels like that. So for a bit he fucking loses anyway: world doesn't blank but it blurs like he's drugged. Except right now all the drugs come from his own system, offering the only kind of defenses it has. He fades out, whether he wants to or not. 

Comes back into focus the way the streak of light turns into the tracer that hits you, with Steve's hand on his arm, Steve in front of him on one knee, the other bent, Steve's voice saying _Hey_. 

Bucky closes his eyes and turns his head away, and reality comes with nausea slopping back over him like a wave. 

Nausea. Like that's even the fucking word. _Nausea_ means being sick to your fucking stomach, so it shouldn't be able to start at your skin, the tips of your fucking fingers and the underside of skin on your thighs, but it does, because the human body doesn't make any fucking sense and then it sends everything to get filtered through the mess that's the human brain on a good day. And the clusterfuck that's inside his skull is nobody's good day. 

Nobody's good day. 

"Don't," he manages to make himself say, words awkward and clumsy in his mouth, "stop, it's me." 

Steve lets go of his arm, and Bucky's not sure he meant that but it's what he said: he said _stop_ and Steve has to go by what he says. Or at least Steve holds to that, anyway. Sometimes Bucky wishes Steve'd fucking _stop_ because God knows anyone and everyone knows better than the fucked up mess in his head - except he knows where that ends, where it always ended, over and over except for one, except for one man and even that exception's gone, now. 

Completely utterly fucking gone. 

It's not pride, it's not anything like that, it's knowing - he's thought he saw, he's _seen_ that bastard son of a bitch here more than once and believed those shadows in his head were real. 

More important, he's seen what's left of whatever thing or wall or _anything_ was there before his head tricked him and remembered, instead of seeing the now. Showed him Pierce instead of a fucking chair and made him think it was the truth. 

He's seen the pieces. Knows it's just as easy to do to bodies and knows that he _would_. He has hated a lot of fucking things in his life, and this isn't even hate, isn't fear or rage, he doesn't _feel_ anything there's no time for emotion there's no _room_ there's just - 

Pieces. Reflex. 

Maybe he did want Steve to let go. 

There's a spreading puddle on the floor from the rain coming in. Bucky watches the drops ripple the surface. He doesn't really mean to say anything, but the edge of the fucking blankness is still there and he doesn't _want_ it and the other side is falling over into stupid fucking words and it's like his thoughts are in a fucking lottery wheel and it's luck which ones fall out. 

And they do fall out. They do. Because the silence makes the fucking wheel spin, he can't fucking _deal_ with the silence. 

He looks at his right arm, looks at where it's bleeding and says, "You know - every time it rains I can smell Siberia." 

It's the stupidest fucking thing to say. It's not even _true_. That smell, _Siberia_ , is peat and evergreen and smoke and snow and even that's a tiny fucking fragment of a big fucking place, and what he meant, what he _means_ is he smells wet concrete and rock dust and harsh cleaners and water and endless fucking underground everything under bad fluorescent lights. Petrichor and ozone and the blood-piss-shit-meat stink of death. He'd fucking rather smell Siberia. It just smells like every-fucking-where-else in the world. Wilderness and people. 

Steve says, "I know," quietly. And this is when he sounds older, sad. When there's no echo with memory, made up or real or obscure, because he never used to sound like this. Didn't know how. Bucky looks at him: sees worried face and light blue eyes and all the earnest concern in the fucking world. Sometimes he thinks he remembers a woman's voice telling him _you can't protect Steve from everything_ except he can't remember whose, so maybe he made it up. Doesn't matter. Even if it's real he probably didn't answer, probably didn't tell whoever it was that he knew. That disease came every few months just to remind him. 

He wouldn't've known _how_ to explain that it wasn't the point, that it wasn't even about protecting Steve from each individual danger or horror anymore because fuck, yeah, even a scrawny sickly guy at twenty-one can handle most shit the world throws. That what he was protecting Steve from is what knowing, living through that shit would turn him into. How it would rip him up, twist him all wrong, poison his head. Maybe break him. Maybe make him something bitter and brittle and angry, instead of what he should be. Could be. If he didn't have to. 

It's the crux of the Garden. Know about evil, know _all_ about evil, know how it gets _everywhere_ . . . 

Steve lifts his left hand, enough to ask the question, not enough to demand. 

After a minute, Bucky holds out his right arm and lets Steve take it, looks at the scrapes and the deeper cut. He tilts his head to look at the places on Bucky's shoulder and side that are bleeding through the cloth, makes it obvious that's what he's doing, and then asks, "You step through the door or something?" 

"More or less," Bucky says. Knows Steve's going to talk him into letting Steve clean them out and stitch them up. Could just _tell_ him to, but Steve's not going to do that. He'll argue and persuade even though there's nothing even fucking logical or sane about the resistance in the first place and they both know when Bucky lets it go it's mostly to make Steve happy. 

Like a fucking dog looking for approval. 

Like after the first fucking time they did this, him still just fucking crazy, after Steve gave him the first thing to hold onto and then that thing almost made him fucking throw himself in the Atlantic to drown because he couldn't handle it.

Later. That was later. A day, a night later. 

First he ate because Steve made food and sat on the bed instead of the floor just because it made Steve's face less unhappy, and at the time he'd've take anything, any piece, any scrap, anything that would tell him what he should fucking do or be. Anything that would tell him what Steve Rogers _wanted_ , except nothing could, because it wouldn't've made any fucking sense. 

Be like calculus to a fucking pig. 

It's all mixed up in his head, a million little flecks suspended in oil and then shaken so he doesn't even know what's going to come out, except he's thinking of then, and of things Steve thinks and believes in, and how fucking stupid this is, how much of a horrible fucking idea, because it all comes back to this _shit_ , every time. Every time he thinks he's past it, every time - 

(Which is stupid, pathology, the broken parts talking anyway: _of course it does, that's how this works, you know that, you haven't slept for for two fucking days and you know_ that _stop it_ except he can't - he does know, and he can't stop anyway, and that just makes it worse.) 

\- everything in his head stirred like fucking numbers for the lottery and what comes out is, "I killed the techs, at the vault." His voice sounds off, distant and mechanical, and he watches Steve's face, for the minute Steve understands and has to hide it. "After I left you by the river, when I went back for the drugs I knew I needed to sleep. I ripped them apart." 

He waits for Steve to hide the change when he understands, except Steve doesn't. Just puts Bucky's arm back on top of the left one on his knees, with Steve's hand resting on his wrist. 

"I know that too," he says, and the corner of his mouth quirks for a second. "Maria told me." 

Nausea comes in another swell, other way, stomach to skin; Bucky has to look away, put the back of his left hand to his mouth to keep from retching. Or cringing, or crawling away, or - 

Steve's hand's still on Bucky's wrist. His thumb moves over the back of Bucky's hand and he goes on, "She also told me that unless you were up to doing some pretty sophisticated forensic fakery, at least one of them tried to shoot you the minute you walked in. In the hip, from where the bullet buried itself in the wall. More or less like they usually did," Steve adds, gaze still steady, "when they thought you were out of control." 

Bucky told him that, he knows. He doesn't remember when, but he knows he did.

And they did. He's hard to kill. But even his body, the thing his body is now - couple bullets to centre of mass and it'll stop him for a little while. Long enough to catch him if they're lucky; if not, to get targets away until blood-loss puts him out. So they could get restraints on, before he came to. 

Mostly when he did the moment was over, anyway. And they hated doing it. Even he takes a while to shake off gunshot wounds. Needing them . . . tended to end badly. 

He stares at the collar of Steve's shirt because he can't look at Steve's face, as Steve says, softly, "Bucky, you killed the men who tortured you. _After_ they attacked you, probably so they could torture you after _that_. If you were going for proof you're dangerous and evil, you're gonna have to try again." 

Nausea comes back again, one more time, through his skin and his bones and all the places it shouldn't be able to come from, settling in the pit of his stomach last. And suddenly he just feels tired and hollowed out, like something ate away everything it could and there's only shells left. He doesn't want to be here, doesn't want to _be_. Doesn't want to remember that, this, these things. _God, Steve, just shoot me._

In to the silence, Steve says, "C'mere and let me fix your arm. And whatever else. Please." 

Bucky can focus on him again, a bit. Words go back to being something he can pick and choose instead of vomit out, and he shakes his head slightly. "Steve," he says, the tired wrapping itself all the way into his thoughts and stripping most of them out, "I broke the fucking balcony door. It's pouring out. The floor's going to turn into a fucking lake." 

"Ye-eah," Steve says, "and while you get your shirt off I'm gonna tape a couple plastic garbage bags over the hole, throw some towels on the floor and ignore it until I give a damn. It's not important - no," he says, " _Bucky_ , it's not important." 

The impulse to argue's instinctive anyway. He can pick the words, but they're heavy and hard to hold onto and he's tired. Bucky gives up and lets Steve pull him to his feet.

 

Steve does tape a couple of big plastic garbage bags over the hole, throws towels on the floor more or less over the lake that already built up, and comes back to where he left Bucky sitting on the futon with sutures and disinfectant, another shirt and a pair of sweats. Bucky doesn't manage to get his shirt off until Steve comes back and helps him, stalled out by the way his mind cringes away from the idea of bare skin. 

Some of the cuts are on his ribs and his side, though, so there's no real choice. So he changes into the dry sweats and loses the shirt and just stares through the dark blue of the futon cover. Tries to make his body stop anticipating the wall hitting the back of his shoulders and head with a hand at his throat, or the blow hitting the side of his head and his face, or _any fucking thing else_ , when Steve's done. 

It's the second time this week Steve's done this. Sewn him up. The other stitches aren't even out yet. 

And the question he doesn't really want to ask nags at him, drags at him all the way through watching Steve run curved needle and sterile thread through his skin, until Bucky has to ask even if he doesn't want to know. 

"Why did Hill know?" 

Steve glances at him, one hand holding his upper arm and the other one holding the needle propeller. Finishes the suture before he manages a too-casual voice so he can answer. "Because after they got out of the Triskelion, she and Natasha went to secure the stuff from the bank vault. So nobody else would." Steve picks up the needle for the next one. 

If he can't make his jaw relax, Bucky knows he's going to fucking break a tooth, or something. But making the muscles let go means letting the words out because keeping his mouth closed is the only thing that keeps them in; they bite their way out, " _Where is it?_ " and then a sick kind of ice pours down his spine because he can hear his own voice, and it's not, definitely fucking not how - 

Steve's stopped. The hand on Bucky's arm's just . . . holding, until Bucky looks at him. 

"Gone," Steve says, quiet, absolute. "Incinerated. No record of construction." 

And he doesn't, he can't - 

He doesn't know if he can believe that. Steve does. But he doesn't know if he does. If he _can_. That someone would do that, throw it away, throw away that much control, and he - 

He catches Steve's wrist and pushes his arm away. Manages, "I can't," and gets up. Puts coffee-table and arm-chair between them, stops at the corner of the kitchen wall. Stops himself with his hand on the wall, so he doesn't go further. Doesn't want to, fuck, Christ, no - _I don't want that, please, I don't want_ \- 

Steve's standing up, but he hasn't moved, hasn't come closer and Bucky can't look at him. He can't, he doesn't know how to - 

Doesn't want, doesn't - 

Pulling the words out makes him feel sick, sicker, worse, pulling out something you're impaled on, but he manages to bite out, " _Why._ Why do you . . . _believe_ that?" God, Steve . . .

"Because Hill took it to Stark," Steve says, in the same quiet voice as before. "And Stark brought in Banner and Elizabeth, and Banner and Elizabeth watched him burn it." 

Breathing; he has to think about breathing and then, and then about if _he_ can believe that, if it's enough, if anything's enough, if, if, if if he can do anything but get stuck here like a skipping record looking at the sudden pit of wondering what he can believe, if after every fucking thing he can believe _anything_. 

Stupid. Fucking, _fucking_ stupid. 

He hasn't thought about it. On purpose. Knew, he knew in the corner of his mind that the Chair had to be somewhere, couldn't just fucking cease to exist, but kept that corner pushed away, locked away. Didn't matter, he told himself it didn't matter because he'd never, there'd fucking _never_ be another time that he - 

That there's no one left that can make him. That he'll die first. Convinced himself it didn't matter and kept it locked up until now. But it does matter it always mattered someone could have found it learned it used it made it new, made it work on _anyone_ and now - now? Now he doesn't know how to do this, think about this. How to put it all back away. 

He's still leaning on the wall, still trying to breathe right when Steve says his name. Turns around and Steve's closer but not close, holding out the clean shirt, saying, "Hey, you're cold, c'mere." 

Clumsy, he's clumsy and his hands don't work, either of them. Steve ends up helping again; he steps back when Bucky pulls away. Not on purpose. Maybe on purpose? Fuck, he can't even tell. 

He can't look at Steve. Can't take the worry and unhappiness and everything he sees. Tries to scratch some kind of thought back together in his head, tries to find logic, tries to find the place where he can _think_ , breathe, breathe and think enough to know. To know anything. To know the things he knows, to look at what Steve just said and recognize it for what it is: recognize that it's like so much other shit, where the choice is believing something because it matches what he can see and feel and know, or giving all of it up and just letting it all - 

Believe this; believe nothing. He has to pick one. And he isn't, he doesn't want, he - the choice _believing nothing_ makes him sick, he can't, so he has to believe this. 

Not the best. Not . . . right. Just, right now, as much as he can. 

"Okay," he says. Almost. Barely manages the sound. To make it more than scraping air. 

He lets his back touch the wall, the corner. Lets himself slide down it to the floor. And fuck, he can't do this, knows he can't. Never fucking say it, never fucking _admit it_ , but - 

It's a while, sitting there. He doesn't really mean to, doesn't mean it to be. The inside of his head feels . . . stuck. He doesn't know what Steve's doing, can't look to see. He can't think. He sits and stares at the floor until his left side and his neck start to ache; then he pushes himself to his feet, fuck, _enough_. 

In the bathroom he splashes cold water on his face, drinks some, keeps himself from putting his fist through the mirror. Either fist. Leans on the sink instead until Steve comes and stops in the doorway. 

What comes out is more vicious than he wants, harsher; what comes out is, "Fuck, Steve, if I were a dog you'd put us out of my misery," and Bucky pushes himself away from the sink, makes himself stand up. 

"You're not," Steve retorts. Arms folded. He says, "Come sit with me?" 

Bucky feels his mouth twist. "Why?" he asks, and his throat tastes bitter. "So I'll stop huddling on the floor like - " 

"So I can think about something else," Steve interrupts, "from how badly I'm gonna break Tony's neck if he lied to Elizabeth about wiping the plans for that thing." 

Bucky looks at him. Doesn't know if he believes _that_ , but doesn't know if he doesn't, either. And Steve's face doesn't show him any lie, however much he looks. 

Steve gives a hint of a shrug. "Not actually that much fun," he elaborates. "Neither is anything else I keep ending up thinking about." 

There's acid in Bucky's throat, but he swallows and tries to ignore it. "Sorry," he says. 

"Nothing you did," Steve says, which is a flat out lie even if Steve doesn't think it is, but he goes on before Bucky can point it out. "Just maybe come watch something with me, so I can cut it out." 

"Yeah," Bucky says. "Okay."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] calling out at the mess you made](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4953220) by [echolalaphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echolalaphile/pseuds/echolalaphile)




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